Author Archives: Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com

Compagnie Non Nova: Vortex

‘Beneath how many layers do we hide our true selves?’ asks Phia Ménard of Company Non Nova. The question posed is explored not through words but through physical action, in one of the most intense, focused, and visceral solo performances you are likely to witness at this year’s London International Mime Festival (or indeed anywhere else).

Created and performed by Ménard, with dramaturgy by Jean-Luc Beaujault, Vortex is the dark companion piece to Compagnie Non Nova’s Total Theatre Award-winning L’Apres-midi d’un Foehn, which wowed Edinburgh Fringe audiences in August 2013. Together, these works are called The Wind Plays, although L’Apres Midi will be known forever more as ‘the plastic bag show’ as it was fondly dubbed in Edinburgh. Both shows feature the same staging: audience seated almost in the round, a dark-floored circular performance space ringed by a hefty number of heavy-duty industrial fans. In fact, both shows have a similar start: a lone performer slowly and meticulously creating a puppet character from a small pink plastic bag and a roll of Sellotape, the little person (and its companions, which are tucked away in the performer’s jacket pockets) animated in a delightful dance by the currents from the fans.

In Vortex, this start has a more ominous feel as the puppet-master is an enormous stuffed figure with every inch of flesh masked by bulky clothes, dark glasses, white gloves – Michelin Man meets Invisible Man. From there on in, the works diverge drastically. L’Apres Midi keeps the nature of animation – life, breath, movement – as its subject matter, with two possible outcomes for the little plastic bag people, depending on which version of the show you see. Vortex takes us on an ever deeper and more disturbing investigation of personal identity and the winds of change that toss us hither and thither through the world. If L’Apres Midi moves from gentle breeze to storm, Vortex takes us far further, into a world of tornados, mistrals, hurricanes and gyres – the human figure in the midst of all this wild, wild wind caught up in a tempestuous succession of metamorphoses.

Phia Ménard enacts a shamanic journey, peeling off onion layer after layer of costume/identity in the search for what is ‘real’. The metaphors jostle for attention in our mind’s eye: here, we see a snake shedding its skin, there a chrysalis with the butterfly within pushing to get out. There are very many breathtaking moments of transformation. A black plastic skin shed from one incarnation of the body on stage is animated by the wind from the fans, to rise as the now shiny white plastic body’s dark shadow. The human figure and its black bin-bag doppelgänger are pitted against each other in a terrible battle, an exploration of the archetypal terror of the evil twin that is reminiscent of the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. At another point, yards and yards of plastic entrails are pulled from the ever-thinning body, to be caught up by the wind into a torque of whirling and writhing high above. Later, a pregnant figure gives birth to the clearest and purest of cellophanes, animated not only by the wind, but by the intense red light beaming down from above, the transparent material shimmering with the blood-red intensity of a thousand rubies.

The piece is complete in itself, needing no further word of explanation to be a beautiful and wondrous exploration of the search for identity and the nature of change and renewal. Knowing a little about the personal history of its creator adds an additional layer of interest and understanding: Phia Ménard was formerly Philippe Ménard a transgender artist and juggler whose previous work has similarly investigated his/her life, personal identity, and the experience of living in transition – caught between states of being.

Compagnie Non Nova offers us a fantastic example of the marrying of scenography and physical performance in both works shown at LIMF 2014 – the space and everything in it manipulated skilfully by light, sound, movement and object animation. Having now seen both shows, I see L’Apres Midi and Vortex as twin works offering a different perspective on the nature of life and death, the animate and the inanimate. By repeating the beginning of L’Apres Midi in Vortex, that connection is firmly made, although this repetition is perhaps unnecessary – if you’ve seen both pieces, you make the connection anyway, and for audience members who haven’t, the beginning of Vortex is perhaps a little puzzling.

That small criticism aside, this is a tremendous piece of work – a visual theatre bursting at the seams with images that delight and haunt in equal measure. Vortex gives no answers, just more questions – the questions that we grapple with (physically, mentally, spiritually) from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Who are we? Why are we here? Where does the internal ‘me’ end and the outside world begin and end? How much power does the individual have to change, and how much is determined by external forces? A whirlwind of ideas, a wonderful show. Tout bouge, tout bouge…

Tomorrow Never Dies

Dorothy Max Prior reflects on the recent works of Forced Entertainment

The Basement arts centre in Brighton on a school night. A young and eager audience, and a stage set simply – just a square of wooden decking and a festoon of lights. Enter two performers, one male and one female, playing themselves (or versions of).

‘In the future…’ says one, and the game begins. A game in which all sorts of possible futures – utopian, dystopian, chilling, amusing, depressing, or just plain daft – are mooted. All of our sci-fi dreams, fantasies and fears are voiced, confronted, laid bare.

In the future, all the world’s problems will be solved. In the future, there will be no men, or women, just rocks. In the future, everyone will live underground. Or under glass domes. Or in space. In the future children will run the world. Or robots. Or cannibals. In the future the world will be one big idyllic garden filled with tame animals controlled by computers. Or a constant war zone. Or peopled by clones. In the future, perhaps everyone will disappear, until there are just two people left, standing together, side by side, one man and one woman. Adam and Eve will inherit the earth, and perhaps start the whole darn thing off all over again…

It’s a beautiful thing, this hour of riffing and reflecting. It has a gorgeous rhythm and pace. The pure power of words; a hundred and one ideas portrayed with poetic precision.

Ah yes, words. They’ve always been important to Forced Entertainment. Words and a lot more besides. All of their work, of whatever scale, has elements in common: ‘Lists and games. Gibberish and silence. Dressing up and stripping down. Confession and lies. Jokes and death.’ Their body of work, although constantly returning to familiar themes and tropes, embraces very many ways, and can be loosely divided into two camps: the great big brash ensemble pieces; and the quieter, more reflective duets. The two most recent works by the company, The Coming Storm (2012) and Tomorrow’s Parties (2013), neatly illustrate the case.

The Coming Storm falls into the big and bold ensemble work category. The key question being investigated in this piece is: What is it that makes a good story? Narratives are set up one after the other by the cast of six, and then disrupted or appropriated by the others. The spoken texts – half-told stories, lists, musings – are only part of the narrative. As is often the case with Forced Entertainment’s ensemble shows, objects tell their own stories: wigs, chairs, sheets, party dresses, a big bunch of twigs, and a rattling old piano tugged hither and thither all play their part in this one. It is said that there are only seven stories in the whole world, and if that’s true, they are all told here – chopped into pieces and thrown into one big stew. Familiar Forced Entertainment tropes emerge: the play between life and death, humour and horror, truth and fiction. It’s a good show, but for me not a great show. Beccy Smith captured the problem in her review of the show on this website: ‘So it’s clever, provocative, sure. Peppered too with easy comedy and pleasant to spend time inside. But it feels straightforward to identify what they are doing, what hypothesis they are testing. I feel I have encountered this question before in their work (most clearly in 2004’s Bloody Mess) and so the experience of the show for me was not so much of treading new ground but rather of revisiting a familiar intellectual landscape, one littered with powerful memories of past incursions to which this exploration couldn’t live up.’

Had Forced Entertainment reached a point where they had said everything they had to say, and were doomed (with supreme irony) just to repeat themselves? It was thus with some trepidation that I went along to see Tomorrow’s Parties. I wasn’t disappointed – finding the show to be one of their best, using familiar devices in a deceptively simple structure, but worked into a beautifully crafted piece of theatre.

Although from the outside it seems that Forced Entertainment have decided to alternate the creation of larger-scale and smaller-scale works, that is not necessarily what’s happening. Spectacular (2008), for example, was originally intended to be a larger ensemble work, but ended up as a piece for two actors ‘by accident’ (as Tim Etchells put it in a 2009 interview with Total Theatre). The company rarely start with a script (Exquisite Pain based on a script by Sophie Calle, was an exception), instead most often starting with improvisations ‘inside a framework of rules’, later annotating and transcribing from rehearsal videos, refining, reworking, and finally scripting. So yes – this is tightly scripted work. Improvisation plays its part in the development, but once developed – that’s it. I find it odd when people in post-show discussions ask if the Forced Entertainment actors were improvising. Far from it, the work is immaculately crafted, finely honed – and as anyone who has seen any of their shows more than once would testify, varies no more or no less from night to night than any other piece of scripted and rehearsed theatre. It was an honour and a revelation for me to see Bloody Mess (which many consider to be their greatest show) three times. Yes, there was a slightly different energy to each show – that’s the point of live theatre – but essentially, what happened on stage was the same each time, even though it seemed at points to be the most chaotic mess imaginably (hence the show’s title). As Tim Etchells put it: ‘Where you see a kind of chaos, or an apparent randomness, in these shows, then it is usually well rehearsed, highly structured.’

2014 sees the thirtieth anniversary of the company. The Forced Entertainment Theatre Co-operative (as it was originally named) was born in 1984 in Sheffield – where the company is still based. This was a conscious choice – to be away from London, in the North where the resistance to Thatcherism was stronger and where there were large warehouse spaces available for low rents. The same six people have stayed in the company for three decades – five actors (Robin Arthur, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Richard Lowdon, who is also the company’s resident designer) and director Tim Etchells. In the past thirty years, their work has embraced theatre, durational performance, installation, video and digital media. From the whirling frenzy of costume changing that is 12am: Awake and Looking Down to the pared-back precision of Speak Bitterness (the ultimate ‘personal confession’ show); from the durational quest that is Quizoola to the deconstructed variety show of First Night; the everything including the kitchen sink constructed chaos of The World in Pictures to the seemingly simple storytelling of The Travels.

In the past decade or so, the company’s work has mostly been produced with European partners, be they venue or festival. Tomorrow’s Parties is a co-production supported by a whole raft of arts organisations – from Bergen, Hamburg, Brussels, Frankfurt, Zurich and (yes) Sheffield. They are also ‘regularly funded’ by Arts Council England.

In recent years, artistic director Tim Etchells has created his own body of solo work, and other members of the ensemble have pursued work with other companies or collaborators. To anyone who views Forced Entertainment as being all about Tim Etchells, I’d counter that companies do not stay together for thirty years if there is no sense of ownership. Forced Entertainment is a collective of six artists, and all six voices are crucial to the work. Despite the possibilities that technologies afford for collaboration by remote – Internet, Skype etc – which Tim Etchells has exploited to the full (for example, in his collaborative ‘auto-teatro’ work with Rotozaza’s Ant Hampton), Forced Entertainment operate, for the most part, in the good old-fashioned devised theatre way. As Etchells put it: ‘ …[through] months together in a shared space. A space where you can work for long hours and share the air – see where the group is, where it’s headed, see what the interests are.’

Forced Entertainment, thirty years from their inception, are now firmly established as part of the British and European theatre establishment. There seemed to be a time when they shied away from ‘theatre’, fitting more comfortably in the ‘live art’ bracket – but the world has moved on, and definitions of theatre have broadened beyond the previous restricted views, with devised work an established part of today’s theatre landscape.

What will the future bring? Maybe everything promised in Tomorrow’s Parties, and more! The company are currently launching their latest work – the biggest ensemble piece yet: The Last Adventures is a collaboration with Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui and claims to be ‘a performance spectacle on an epic scale”. Working with the largest cast the company have used in some time, The Last Adventures ‘has the visual extravagance of a living art installation or a large scale choreography, while its live soundtrack mixes electronics and live instrumentation to create an intoxicating audio experience.’ As the premier was in Gladbeck (Germany), Total Theatre has yet to see it – but no doubt it will be arriving in the UK very soon!

In the meantime, the company are inviting anyone who wants to join the game to tell them about their experience of Forced Entertainment. Texts can be personal, academic, tightly focussed or free-associating. There’s only one rule: each must be exactly 365 words long. At the end of the year they will select 30 texts for a limited edition book – one word for each day of the company’s existence. The word is out…

Footnotes:

Tomorrow’s Parties was seen by Dorothy Max Prior at The Basement, Brighton, 7 November 2013.

The world premiere of The Last Adventures was at Maschinenhalle Zweckel, Gladbeck, Ruhrtriennale 2012 – 2014 International Festival of the Arts, 5 – 8 September 2013. It featured 17 performers and live music from Tarek Atoui.

For more information on the company and all the shows referenced, see www.forcedentertainment.com

Forced Entertainment 30^th Birthday 365-word posts can be submitted by writing to: 365@forcedentertainment.com or post online, using Twitter hashtag #FE365.

Quotes from Tim Etchells taken from interviews with Dorothy Max Prior and Alexander Roberts for Total Theatre Magazine, published in print editions Vol 20.04 and Vol 22.03. These and other back copies of the print magazine are available to purchase from University of Winchester. Email Christian Francis on info@totaltheatre.org.uk

Enfila’t: Folds

The stage is a playground of visual delights. A backdrop of ruched and rumpled cardboard, a folding screen daubed with Picasso-blue squiggles and splurges, a giant metal cylinder that’s an odd cross between a German Wheel and a double-edged tightwire, and a kind of suspended roundabout that doesn’t look like it could hold the four acrobat-musicians and assorted instruments perched on its circular wooden base – yet does.

And what happens upon it is truly enchanting. A length of Sellotape becomes a twanged bass string, accompanied by a percussive scissor snip, and a paper-and-comb kazoo. Cardboard boxes grow legs, become home to a somersaulting Jack-in-the-Box, or turn into an Aunt Sally fairground stall (cue a delightful interactive game as scrunched-up balls of brown paper sail back and forth between auditorium and stage). A keyboard appears in the backdrop, played by disembodied hands. A banjo player walks a tightwire without missing a note. An accordionist weaves through folds of cardboard that mirror his instrument’s expansion and contraction.

Folds is a balancing act – physical performance with musicianship, the manipulation of fragile materials like paper and paint against the solidity of metal and wood. ‘Modern life thrives on organisation and precision, but in its folds and creases it still surprises’ it says in the programme notes – and our four entertainers use the hour or so that they have with us to charm and surprise with an exploration of materiality that challenges the delineation of circus skills, live music and object manipulation. Although the pre-show publicity places the emphasis on the play within the paper world, the performers’ interactions with the more solid objects – musical instruments, circus apparatus – are just as vital to the content of the piece.

Catalan based Enfila’t, like La Fura del Baus and Els Comediants before them, create a visual theatre rich in skill and playfulness. It is no surprise to learn that the piece was co-created by scenographer Xavier Ella – ‘design’ is not a tack-on element in this show, it is at the heart of the matter. The four performers have amassed a multitude of skills between them: Manolo Alcantara (the company’s creative director) is a renowned contemporary circus and street arts maker and a gifted performer; Xabi Elicagaray is not only a multi-instrumentalist and circus performer but also runs a second illustrator and designer. The hi-energy bundle that is Karl Stets (on loan from Sweden’s Cirkus Cirkor) and Argentinean Claudio Dirigo (aka Claudio Inferno), a beautifully bendy and fluid acrobat, make up the fab foursome. All have a lovely complicity with their fellow performers and with the audience.

It really is a magical show – hard to fault. There are deeper and more thought-provoking circus shows out there, but you’d be hard pushed to find anything as lyrical and endearing, and as visually and musically enchanting, as Folds. The perfect family show for all seasons.

Race Horse Company: Petit Mal Concrete Circus

Laughing in the wreckage, standing defiant as the world throws things at you – and the rivalry of men up against it. These are the ideas at the heart of Petit Mal.

We start in what seems to be a moody, gloomy garage or basement, the stage so dark that it’s hard to see what’s happening (from my seat in the rear stalls, anyway). Steely blue and dull amber lights. Clunking metal parts, stacked car tyres, discarded planks of wood. The sound of grinding guitars, and Bob Dylan’s growling voice blares out from the PA: ‘Same old rat race, life in the same old cage.’ Cue descent of a rusty old ‘cage’ and some beefy acro and aerial moves from the three-man team onstage. It’s hard to say how and why a big blue yoga-ball and a trampoline belong in this world, but they get worked in effortlessly. In this opening section, the themes and the key skills of the show are established. Company frontman Petri Tuominem is a good all-rounder and a superb Chinese Pole artist with a hard-edged attacking style. Rauli Kosonen ups the ante with his extraordinary trampolining – somehow ultra-relaxed and dynamic at one and the same time. The big and bearded Kalle Lehto is an earthy breakdancer and object manipulator, and a highly magnetic performer who wins my attention again and again, despite the competition. Boys will be boys, and the three tug and tussle their way through a succession of stunning scenes.

If this first 20 minutes had been it, then this would be a brilliant show. Word on the (circus) street has it that this in fact was the original show: a prize-winning short that got feted and supported and eventually made into a full-length show – a show that is somehow less than the sum of its parts. They would have been better off creating three separate short pieces and touring them together. In some ways, this is what this show feels like.

A middle section plays out as a surreal dreamscape. There is a sudden wash of bright light and colour, flashing strobes, and ear-bleeding beats – Scrooge McDuck pops up on-screen, the stage is taken over by a galloping pantomime horse, the space fills up with bouncing balls and falling feathers, a trio of Elvises (Elvii?) in flared white jumpsuits leap around. Why I don’t know, but it’s all enjoyable enough, particularly the terrifyingly funny half-a-horse trampolining.

We then return to the gloomy moody world of the opening section, and Dylan’s ‘Highlands’ starts in again – the song is played at least three times in this 70-minute show, interspersed with Joy Division and DJ Shadow tracks, and compositions by the show’s sound designer Tuomas Norvio. This section is the shakiest structurally – the pace dips and soars, and there are at least three false endings before we get the final scene, which turns out to be a coda rather than a climax – but it’s a great showcase of the circus skills. Rauli Kosonen’s final bout on the trampoline is breathtaking.

Petit Mal has been touring for a few years, yet this performance felt a little shaky. I got the feeling that the company are done with it, moving on (they are just about to start work on their new show, Super Sunday). Or perhaps the slightly slack feel of some sections was a result of the appalling inattentiveness of the audience, many of whom – dressed in Santa hats with drinks in hand, arriving late, leaving early, constantly nipping off to the loo, chatting throughout – seemed to have come to the wrong show. They were expecting some light-hearted entertainment, and Petit Mal is far from that, it’s dark and dangerous. And the show was marketed as ‘an exhilarating spectacle from start to finish’ for all the family, so there were inevitably a fair few cross parents ferrying distressed five-year-olds out of the auditorium throughout.

Circus presentation in the UK, it would seem, is still battling with audience (and perhaps programmer) expectations that it exists to provide nothing more than a fun family spectacle. That aside, Petit Mal is an enriching experience – dramaturgically flawed, but full of extraordinary ideas, and performed by three top-notch circus artists with world-class skills in unusual areas of practice.

Ed Fringe 2013: The Last Post

Dorothy Max Prior on the Total Theatre Awards winners and nominees

So that’s it – the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is done and dusted. Shows have ended, Awards have been given, and the colourful Brigadoon city (purple cows! red-and-gold Spiegeltents! lime-green Astroturf!) has melted into the mist, leaving behind the stern grey brick of all those kirks and castles, and the quiet and shadowy cobbled alleyways and staircases that Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mr Hyde scurried down after dark.

This year’s Fringe saw a fantastic number of top quality circus shows, and this was reflected in the Total Theatre Awards nominees list, which included no less than six circus or circus-related shows: NoFit State’s Bianco, Circa’s Wunderkammer, Pirates of the Carabina’s Flown, Compagnie Bal’s La Poème, Gandini Juggling’s Smashed, and Stefan Sing & Cristiana Casadio’s Tangram. All of those shows have been reviewed over the three weeks of Fringe 2013, or honoured in Adrian Berry’s circus round-up. This strong representation yielded results, as we had not one but two circus winners of Total Theatre Awards 2013: Flown by Pirates of the Carabina (from the UK, presented by Crying Out Loud at Underbelly) won in the Total Theatre Awards Physical and Visual category, and Australian company Circa received a special Significant Contribution Award in honour not only of Wunderkammer (presented in Edinburgh this year), but of all their other magnificent work over the past two decades, which we feel it is fair to say has changed the landscape of contemporary circus.

Crying Out Loud, one of the most enterprising producing companies in the UK, had a double success in the Physical/Visual category as they also presented Compagnie Non Nova from France, who won with L’Apres-midi d’un Foehn (known to all who have seen it as the lovely plastic bag show). It is a stunningly simple idea that works beautifully: a circle of fans create an airstream that animates an ensemble of different coloured plastic bags, cut and tied so that they inflate into tiny dancing humanoid shapes. If you didn’t see it in Edinburgh and your curiosity is piqued, note that another version of the show (the ‘adult’ version, apparently) will be presented at the London International Mime Festival 2014 (opening 8 January).

So two great winners, but the rest of the nominees were a pretty amazing bunch – and an interesting international mix. Yet another Crying Out Loud show made the shortlist, Compagnie Bal’s La Poème (like Compagnie Non Nova, presented at Summerhall venue), featuring the highly talented circus artist Jeanne Mordoj, using her contortion and manipulation skills to create something unique. As our review says, ‘What a pleasure and an honour to see a performer in such control of her body, and of the imaginary world that she has created on a bare stage, armed with little more than a box of eggs, a harmonium, and a pretty green silk skirt.’

Work by women performers/choreographers from across Europe featured heavily in the nominations list. Not only Jeanne Mordoj from France, but also Markéta Vacovská from the Czech Republic (One Step Before the Fall), and Scotland’s own Claire Cunningham (Ménage à Trois).

One Step Before the Fall, presented by Spitfire Company and Damúza Theater at Zoo, is a collaboration between dancer/choreographer Markéta Vacovská and singer/multi-instrumentalist Lenka Dusilová. Together these two wonderfully talented women create an extraordinary live play between sound and physical action in a piece that is an exploration of (and homage to) Muhammed Ali’s boxing life. In this intensive piece Markéta Vacovská captures the trance-like concentration, energy and focus of the boxer – not through acting but by being. Pushing and pushing herself further and further, she becomes pure, archetypal male energy, and for 45 minutes (I doubt if she could possibly keep the energy up for any longer) works through a moving meditation that, whilst containing little in the way of conventional narrative, nevertheless tells a thousand stories. The live sound (haunting vocals, looped electric guitar, percussion, sampled sounds) is mixed with broadcast recordings of Ali’s voice from the later years when Parkinson’s disease had set in. There is no preaching, no conclusions drawn – the audience are left to form their own views on whether this was a sacrifice worth making. I’ve seen a good few shows about boxing – and I’ve even helped to make one – but this is the best by a long shot. The passion, the desperation, the drive, the joy, the weariness, the pain – it’s all here, an exploration of what it means to be a boxer unencumbered by the usual clichéd storylines.

Ménage à Trois, presented by National Theatre of Scotland at Paterson’s Land, is a dance-theatre piece created by performer/choreographer Claire Cunningham (who is joined onstage by Christopher Owen) and co-director/video designer Gail Sneddon. It’s a visually beautiful piece, well staged. The set design – oversized pieces of dark wood furniture – give a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland feel to the piece, and the animated monochrome line drawings of the video projection are lovely, and well integrated into the show. Cunningham’s choreographic approach is ‘rooted in the use/misuse, study and distortion of crutches’ which here appear in many different guises and forms: suspended from the ceiling as objets d’art; sculpted into Oskar Schlemmer style multi-material dresses; ‘puppeteered’ as dance partners or dream lovers. Owen arrives well into the piece, as the dream lover or companion conjured by Cunningham. There are some stunning images created, but the piece sinks a little in the middle, and is also held back by the text which is hammered home by appearing both in the soundscape and as part of the visual landscape. The soundscape generally could be stronger, but there is one absolutely gorgeous moment when Claire Cunningham sings Mozart’s ‘Deh Vieni Non Tardar’ live – a magic moment.

Also in the Physical and Visual nominees list was Abattoir Fermé’s Tourniquet, one of five shows presented at the Ed Fringe 2013 under the auspices of the Big in Belgium programme of Flemish theatre. Tourniquet is a word-free piece that presents a nightmarish vision, albeit in such a stylised and almost cartoonish mode that it never transgresses into threat. The piece was inspired by clandestine exorcisms that are still performed throughput Europe, and features three ghosts or devils hanging on for grim life (or death). Our gruesome threesome walk an endless treadmill of rituals and compulsive actions. They seem to die a thousand times, never able to leave their self-created limbo. It’s like a cross between early La Fura dels Baus, The Addams Family, and The Night Porter. The images are ostensibly shocking, but there’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek punk knowingness and devilish humour about it all that strips it of any real shock value. Instead, we seem to be looking at a series of beautifully sculpted tableau representing a contemporary view of hell (or perhaps they are trying to purge themselves in purgatory): a naked pale-as-the-moon woman ‘crucified’ on a wooden beam, a big broad bare-buttocked man in a white rubber apron and butcher’s gloves advancing ominously, an unfurled Nazi flag, a Twin Peaks-like lonesome guitar twang, laboured heavy breathing, a constantly repeating TV clip of an American preacher screeching ‘in the name of Jesus I find you, Devil’, a deconstructed rendering of ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’, and a body drowned in a bath (the puddles are there for us to avoid as we leave at the end) then wrapped in cellophane. All of this washed down by an endless amount of blood red wine… It’s not a show I could say I truly enjoyed, but it’s one that has stayed with me.

Abattoir Fermé, Tourniquet | Photo: Stef Lernous

Also part of the Big in Belgium programme were two other Awards nominated shows: Freeze, by Nick Steur, (shortlisted in the Emerging Artist category); and Bonanza by Berlin (who confusingly come from Belgium not Germany) – a piece with no live performers that caused consternation amongst some critics. Bonanza went on to win a Total Theatre Award for Innovation.

The second winner in this category was The Worst of Scottee, by cabaret artist Scottee, who is mostly known through his work with Duckie. But this show was something else altogether. Directed by the always enterprising and interesting Chris Goode, The Worst of Scottee wove together his bouffon-camp cabaret turns with confessional-autobiographical stories (sex, lies and trolling round the West End) and the occasional blast of recorded film footage (teachers and relatives commenting on his teenage years). It’s all set in a fabulously designed mock passport-photo booth, which is used as a confessional box, Scottee pulling curtains back and forth to hide or reveal himself as each anecdote or song emerges (and he has a lovely voice, actually). It is all a bit naughty and very camp, but towards the end there’s a distinct switch in tone and a heartbreaking story emerges that casts all the previously confessed misdemeanours in a very different light. Crossovers between comedy, cabaret and theatre were upfront in the Awards shortlist, and there was a wealth of one-person shows playing with those forms nominated, from the wonderfully entertaining Victoria Melody’s Major Tom to the outrageously funny Adrienne Truscott’s Asking For It; Jamie Wood’s delightful Beating McEnroe to the irrepressible Squidboy.

A third winner in the Innovation category was the extraordinary Irish production Have I No Mouth by Brokentalkers, a beautiful, disturbing, and inspiring exploration of bereavement, loss, and grief. For all the heartbreak presented, it is ultimately life affirming – and a marvellous example of how terrible, painful life events can be explored in a theatrically successful way.

The winner in the Emerging Artist category was the show that many saw as the outsider: Sh!t Theatre’s Job Seekers Anonymous, a totally cheery jaunt that featured witty self-penned tunes, some very silly dancing, newspaper skirts, poundshop plastic hula hoops, and a very funny Thatcher skit casting her as the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz for a cheeky rendition of ‘If I Only Had a Heart’(Iron Man/Tin Lady, get it?) – all the funnier as the set-up had implied that we were going to get ‘The Witch is Dead’. Poor Theatre is their toolbox – along with a very healthy understanding of popular culture and political satire (I’m still chuckling at their Job Seekers interview for the job of prostitute). And these girls can sing!

The Emerging category showed a truly eclectic mix of young theatre-makers doing their thing at the Edinburgh Fringe: the wonderful high energy and professionalism of New Wolsey’s Party Piece; a great second show from Lecoq graduates Clout; more Lecoq-based delights from the all-female company Remote Control, whose La Donna è Mobile gave us a wonderful hour of vivid imagery deconstructing classic views of the female form; a highly entertaining and beautifully structured one-man multi-media show, I Could Have Been Better, by Idiot Child; and the aforementioned Nick Steur’s Freeze – an extraordinary crossover between sculpture and performance which was predicated on one young man’s ability to balance rocks on top of each other.

All in all, a pretty interesting year – and a batch of very worthy Total Theatre Award winners and nominees.

For a full list of the Total Theatre Award winners see here. Nominees listed here.